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Information about AI from the News, Publications, and Conferences

If you are looking for an answer to the question What is Artificial Intelligence? and you only have a minute, then here's the definition the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence offers on its home page: "the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines."

However, if you are fortunate enough to have more than a minute, then please get ready to embark upon an exciting journey exploring AI (but beware, it could last a lifetime) …

Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe that everyone has the potential to contribute something to our shared knowledge, and that everyone should be able to access that knowledge, free of interference. We host the Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support the volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible, and advocate for policies that enable Wikimedia and free knowledge to thrive. The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit organization that relies on donations. We receive financial support from millions of individuals around the world, with an average donation of about $15.

Google is pouring an additional $3.1 million into Wikipedia, bringing its total contribution to the free encyclopedia over the past decade to more than $7.5 million, the company announced at the World Economic Forum Tuesday. A little over a third of those funds will go toward sustaining current efforts at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, and the remaining $2 million will focus on long-term viability through the organization's endowment. Google will also begin allowing Wikipedia editors to use several of its machine learning tools for free, the tech giant said. What's more, Wikimedia and Google will soon broaden Project Tiger, a joint initiative they launched in 2017 to increase the number of Wikipedia articles written in underrepresented languages in India, and to include 10 new languages in a handful of countries and regions. It will now be called GLOW, Growing Local Language Content on Wikipedia.

Google is pouring an additional $3.1 million into Wikipedia, bringing its total contribution to the free encyclopedia over the past decade to more than $7.5 million, the company announced at the World Economic Forum Tuesday. A little over a third of those funds will go toward sustaining current efforts at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, and the remaining $2 million will focus on long-term viability through the organization's endowment. Google will also begin allowing Wikipedia editors to use several of its machine learning tools for free, the tech giant said. And Wikimedia and Google will soon broaden Project Tiger, a joint initiative they launched in 2017 to increase the number of Wikipedia articles written in underrepresented languages in India, to include 10 new languages in a handful of countries and regions. It will now be called GLOW, Growing Local Language Content on Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia community, the free encyclopedia that is built from a model of openly editable content, is notorious for its toxicity. The issue was so bad that the number of active contributors or editors--those that made one edit per month--had fallen by 40 percent during an eight-year period. Even though there's not one solution to combat this issue, Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that supports Wikipedia, decided to use artificial intelligence to learn more about the problem and consider ways to combat it. In one effort to stop the trolls, Wikimedia Foundation partnered with Jigsaw (the tech incubator formerly known as Google Ideas) on a research project called Detox using machine learning to flag comments that might be personal attacks. This project is part of Jigsaw's initiative to build open-source AI tools to help combat harassment on social media platforms and web forums.

Miriam Adelson is an accomplished physician who has published around a hundred research papers on the physiology and treatment of addiction. She also runs a high-profile substance-abuse clinic in Las Vegas. Yet Wikipedia does not have an entry for her. Adelson was among thousands of names flagged by Quicksilver, a software tool by San Francisco startup Primer designed to help Wikipedia editors fill in blind spots in the crowdsourced encyclopedia. Its underrepresentation of women in science is a particular target.

Miriam Adelson is an accomplished physician who's published around a hundred research papers on the physiology and treatment of addiction, and runs a high-profile substance-abuse clinic in Las Vegas. Yet Wikipedia does not have an entry for her. Adelson was among thousands of names flagged by Quicksilver, a software tool by San Francisco startup Primer designed to help Wikipedia editors fill in blind spots in the crowdsourced encyclopedia. Its underrepresentation of women in science is a particular target. The world's fifth most-visited website has a long-running problem with gender bias: Only 18 percent of its biographies are of women.

I present a web service for querying an embedding of entities in the Wikidata knowledge graph. The embedding is trained on the Wikidata dump using Gensim's Word2Vec implementation and a simple graph walk. A REST API is implemented. Together with the Wikidata API the web service exposes a multilingual resource for over 600'000 Wikidata items and properties.

No one saw the crisis coming: a coordinated vandalistic effort to insert Squidward references into articles totally unrelated to Squidward. In 2006, Wikipedia was really starting to get going, and really couldn't afford to have any SpongeBob SquarePants-related high jinks sullying the site's growing reputation. Someone had to stop Squidward. The Wikipedia community knew it couldn't possibly mobilize human editors to face down the trolls--the onslaught was too great, the work too tedious. So instead an admin cobbled together a bot that automatically flagged errant insertions of the Cephalopod Who Shall Not Be Named.

Aaron Halfaker just built an artificial intelligence engine designed to automatically analyze changes to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia anyone can edit. In crowdsourcing the creation of an encyclopedia, the not-for-profit website forever changed the way we get information. It's among the ten most-visited sites on the Internet, and it has swept tomes like World Book and Encyclopedia Britannica into the dustbin of history. If anyone can edit Wikipedia, anyone can mistakenly add bogus information.

Traditional disease surveillance systems suffer from several disadvantages, including reporting lags and antiquated technology, that have caused a movement towards internet-based disease surveillance systems. Internet systems are particularly attractive for disease outbreaks because they can provide data in near real-time and can be verified by individuals around the globe. However, most existing systems have focused on disease monitoring and do not provide a data repository for policy makers or researchers. In order to fill this gap, we analyzed Wikipedia article content. We demonstrate how a named-entity recognizer can be trained to tag case counts, death counts, and hospitalization counts in the article narrative that achieves an F1 score of 0.753. We also show, using the the 2014 West African Ebola virus disease epidemic article as a case study, that there are detailed time series data that are consistently updated that closely align with ground truth data. We argue that Wikipedia can be used to create the first community-driven open-source emerging disease detection, monitoring, and repository system.